The Shortest History of England (2022)

Just finished this interesting book. From my personal notes on it, unedited for this post:

The Shortest History of England: Empire and Division from the Anglo-Saxons to Brexit – A Retelling for Our Times by Hawes, James

The apparent thesis of the book: The present social divisions in the UK go all the way back to the Romanization of the south, and even farther back, to geology. The nation has always been divided between the elites of southern England and the rest of the nation, made up of northern England, Scotland, northern Ireland, and Wales. This does not seem to be a class analysis along Marxist lines, but a cultural and linguistic analysis. 

I don’t know enough to evaluate this thesis, but it might be persuasive. If nothing else, the author has explained a great deal about the cultural and linguistic divisions in the UK— specifically, 1) how the RP (Received Pronunciation) marks higher social class, and 2) how a limited upward mobility allows some commoners to become gentlefolk. 

I don’t see much authorial bias in the earlier parts of the book, but in the last chapter the author makes it clear he is/was anti-Thatcher and pro-European Union. Throughout, he seems to portray the Old English and their successors, through the Royalists and all the way to today’s Tories (Conservatives), as greedy oppressors of the Welsh, Irish, Scots, and northern English.